


The Symbiont

by chrysalisdreams



Category: Tangled (2010)
Genre: Gen, You could say this is from the magic's point of view.
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-01-26
Updated: 2015-01-26
Packaged: 2018-03-09 03:44:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,004
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3235046
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/chrysalisdreams/pseuds/chrysalisdreams
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Once upon a time, a drop of sunlight fell to earth. Or, you could say: "A being whose native world was a star crash landed on our planet."</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Symbiont

Once upon a time, a drop of sun fell to earth. Where it fell, a flower with miraculous healing powers grew.

You’ve heard this story? No, you haven’t heard this story. This story is about a living being that came from a blazing star. Something went wrong as she traveled through dimensions. In distress, she crash landed on a planet rich with life very different from her own kind. To protect herself from the harsh conditions, she implanted in the gnarled rhizome of flowering plant. The flower was dying, exposed to the harsh weather after part of the cliff had fallen into the sea.

She helped the flower live. In return, the flower’s protection allowed her to survive the foreign world. With her help, the seed pushed golden tendrils through the hard rock cliff and stretched green leaves and a healthy blossom up from poor soil. It withstood the salty wind and the cold, damp nights. Left alone, the symbiont and the lily would have spread the lily’s offspring over the land in a golden wave of healing flowers.

But that was not to be.

 

Although the queen’s immune system was exhausted from fighting infection, it was strong enough to prevent the symbiont from settling into the pregnant woman’s body. As in the rhizome of the flower, the symbiont found a safe place in the growing child. From the tea in the mother’s stomach, the symbiont traveled through the bloodstream, into the placenta, then on into the baby. In the baby, she mingled with the fine white swirl of hair on the baby’s head. She grew, casting out to each follicle, until she was strong enough to heal the mother.

A few months later, when Rapunzel was born, she was born with golden hair, the combination of the symbiont and the princess’s natural baby hair. When baby Rapunzel shed that first hair, as all babies do, the symbiont replaced the vellus with silky, sun-bright tendrils.

Rapunzel was never sick. Her immune system had assistance all through the early years of battling bacteria, viruses, molds, and parasites. When toddler Rapunzel poisoned herself by eating Mother Gothel’s pretty nightshade berries, or when Mother Gothel unknowingly carried home influenza, or when young Rapunzel burned her fingers on a hot iron frying pan, the symbiont returned Rapunzel’s living systems back to working order.

Mother Gothel knew nothing about mothering, having watched her parents die of plague when she was almost too young to remember them. Mother Gothel could not remember her parents' faces, but she clearly recalled Death’s face, and she was terrified at the surety of meeting it again. When she left baby Rapunzel to sleep on her stomach atop a too-deep featherbed, Gothel did not intend to suffocate the child. In fact, she screamed when she went to wake Rapunzel and found her too still. How relieved the woman was when the symbiont restarted Rapunzel’s breathing! Rapunzel’s lungs were much better at drawing in oxygen than the symbiont had been able to do through hair tendrils.

Healing Mother Gothel’s exhausted cellular structure was necessary. The symbiont did not judge worthiness by a moral code, but by a practical one. Mother Gothel provided for the young Rapunzel’s practical needs: the acquisition of food, shelter and warmth that also sheltered and warmed the symbiont, and companionship, the need for which the symbiont understood. When particular soundwaves activated the symbiont, she was able to -- briefly -- travel on those frequencies into other bodies and right their beings as well as she did for Rapunzel. Mother Gothel needed shoring up more and more frequently as time went on. Her body could no longer repair itself. Through the power of harmonics, the symbiont maintained the ancient woman’s tissues even at a distance.

Plainly stated, the symbiont hummed to keep Mother Gothel young and alive.

That stopped when Flynn Rider used a shard of broken mirror to cut off Rapunzel’s magic hair. When the tendrils severed, the symbiont drew back into Rapunzel’s sheltering body, leaving behind dry, brown stalks where rich blonde strands had been. The shock of the abrupt cut made the symbiont retreat into Rapunzel’s skin. She contracted like a snapped elastic fiber. She stopped “humming”. Mother Gothel’s cells experienced rapid decay and desiccation. The woman was dust before she completed her fall from the tower window.

For eighteen years, the symbiont had flowed freely. She had been massive, a long river of silken hair. Confined now in the space of Rapunzel’s skin tissue, she sought an avenue to grow out again. She was small but rich, a germ of herself.

Rapunzel’s tears welled. They flowed up from her tear ducts. The symbiont flowed out with one great, hot tear that splashed down onto Flynn’s cooling cheek. Shock from the stab wound was killing Flynn faster than the blood he had lost. Rapunzel, desperate with sorrow, sang the healing incantation Gothel taught to her. Resonating with energies that were no longer being wicked away by Mother Gothel, the symbiont’s grain of gold echoed back a blooming wave of vitality; she wove together Flynn’s muscle and skin; she pushed adrenaline-laden blood toward his heart to wake the sluggish pump.

The wave faded, and the symbiont folded back into a kernel of otherwordly life, detached from the companionship she had fostered for eighteen years. She tumbled through Flynn Rider’s bloodstream on enlivened currents. Already falling into a stasis, the drop of sunlight sought a seed like itself. In Flynn Rider, beloved future husband of Princess Rapunzel of Corona, the symbiont slept.

All of Rapunzel and Flynn’s children were born with hair as golden as the healing light of a blazing star. The happy couple made many children, who went on to make many grandchildren, and great-grandchildren, and so on until their genetic line extended like meadow flowers in a sheltering valley. None of them -- not a one -- ever seemed to get sick worse than a bit of seasonal sniffles.

 

_And they all lived happily ever after, in a world they made their own._


End file.
